New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

[Malacite]

I just bought a new LG206 20.1" Widescreen LCD Monitor form Futureshop today. It looks so much better than my old POS CRT monitor, but now FFXI looks like sheer ass every time I run it.

I've tried messing around with the Overlay Graphics but nothing seems to work; my characters look blown up and jaggy. I didn't have this problem before when running in 1024x768 (I think that was it, might have been 480) on my old monitor.


Every time I load up FF my monitor tells me to use 1680x1050 for optimal resolution, but even on that the game looks like ass. WTF do I do?

[DakAttack]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

I ran FFXI in widescreen as 1280x800, and it looked a little vertically challenged. Give us a screenshot so we might know what ruining is.

[Tsrwedge]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

Did you change the aspect ratio in Config > Misc. 2?

[Malacite]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

Aspect Ratio? I don't even see that under Config.
I've tried it on various resolution settings but it always looks about the same ><


The 1st attachment is how it looked before the last 2 are how it looks now. (running 1280x1024 as my friend recommended. Really doesn't look any different on the higher settings and my monitor says to run it on 1680x1050 but it still looks the same)


Okay this is weird... because I just attached screenshots, and they actually don't look bad at all; yet in game it looks like shit.


WTF?

[InuTrunks]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

You need to change your aspect ratio to either 16:9 or 16:10 which ever one you have

[Malacite]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

How do I do that? And how do I find out?

[Raydeus]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

If your monitor is giving you a 1680x1050 warning then you gotta change your aspect ratio to 16:10 for it to display the game properly regardless of your background resolution, but its a good idea setting your background res to at least 1680x1680 (you can go higher if your want) and overlay resolution set to 1680x1050.

The reason why screenshots look good is because POL takes'em in a 4:3 regardless of your settings. Fraps works much better for that kinda thing.

Edit > To adjust aspec ratio you gotta go to Config > Misc like Tsrwedge said, you can change that anytime while on XI (although the character screen will always look crappy and fat because that setting doesn't apply to the character screen for some reason).

[Malacite]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

Oh so it's in game? That's kinda dumb. Well thank you all very much ^_ ^ Gonna fire up FFXI now and I'll give you an update.


EDIT: My background only has 3 options, and I really prefer 512x512. 1024x1024 seems to shrink my chat log too much.

[Raydeus]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

Oh, to change your background res beyond the config setting you gotta edit the registry.

Go here to find more info about it.


It will depend on your rig if it can handle higher settings or not without a frame rate drop, but the game looks way better once you get the background res to match (or go above) the overlay res.


Edit > The setting that controls the chat and menu sizes is the Overlay resolution, you simply have too much screen real state for XI's font XD

[Lunaryn]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

Background Resolution would not affect text size, that's purely a question of the resolution the monitor is driven at (Overlay Resolution) which for a flat panel monitor should be the native resolution (this does create some issues, yes...)

Personally, now that I have fast enough hardware not to get very sluggish from it, I've gone to a background resolution of 1536x1536 (0x600). You'll need to edit the registry for this; look under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\PlayOnlineUS\FinalFantasyXI for the two keys set to either 200 (512) or 400 (1024) and change these. A lot of people recommend setting this to only a power of 2 (e.g. 800 (2048)) but a good modern card should be able to handle a setting in-between (even my old R200 handles it fine, aside from the normal slowness of running with textures that detailed; my new G76 is fast enough to have no slowdown with it).

Note that you'll still see rather noticeable pixellation on objects not that far away (e.g. your character in 3rd person view when not zoomed in) if you have Mipmapping turned on. If this is enough to bother you, either turn off mipmapping or increase to a higher value like 800 (2048), whichever works better for your situation.

If you don't have the video hardware to get resolutions this high, I'm not quite certain what to tell you besides looking into getting another CRT monitor; DFPs simply don't cope well with low resolutions, the distortion you'll get from the monitor itself is probably not worth any improvement you might get from running at a lower Overlay Resolution. If you have to go with a DFP and you want something that looks good with a lower background resolution, you might try looking for a monitor that isn't wide-screen and has a native resolution of 1024x768, though such a monitor may be somewhat old or small compared to most of what's on the market now... Alternately, maybe you can find a non-widescreen monitor with a native resolution of 1600x1200 and run that at an overlay resolution of 800x600? Such a monitor would probably be pretty high-end right now, though, I'd think...

[Malacite]

Re: New Monitor is Ruining FF XI ; ;

WTF I thought I posted a thank you message earlier... damn browser.

I fixed the problem thank you Ray. I did exactly what you said and that got it.